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This is the responsibility of the theme or the "plasma style" or some such; you might find one that does something like what you want. In my quest for a dark theme that's functional (and so *not* anything like Breeze) I stumbled on a transparent panel.

Under the hood it's all qml and css. I've tried tweaking the css, with some results, but that's a treacherous path...

How to make the K-Menu, and panels, transparent

There is no option in KDE System Setting for this, indeed - therefor you have to do it by hand:

1. If they are not already there, create the according plasma and desktoptheme directories in your /home-folder:

Code:

$ cd /home/.local/share
$ mkdir plasma plasma/desktoptheme

2. Make a folder with the name of your new, personal Plasma Theme and put a link to the colour scheme in there, which you want to use for it (e.g. I linked mine to /usr/share/plasma/desktoptheme/breeze-dark/colors).

3. The next step is to create a metadata.desktop file that contains the informations about the transparency of your K-Menu (and all of your panels, as they are automatically affected, too!):

4. Now you can choose your new Plasma Theme in KDE System Settings -> Appearance.

PS: As stated in the link to KDE TechBase above, [BlurBehindEffect] can only be modified since KDE Frameworks 5.57 and later.

PPS: I made the experience that every time you change any values for [ContrastEffect] or [BlurBehindEffect] you have to log out and in again for all of the changes to take effect in combination - just switching to another theme and back does not work for all changes to take place.

Last edited by Schwarzer Kater; May 27th 2020 at 01:42 PM.
Reason: typos, as usual and PS and PPS

For better effects ( too much transparency ), I used Keepin theme's background.svg and panel-background.svg . It helps control the colour, noise and transparency value. Now I have a variant of included theme with blur and transparency.

I completely forgot to mention some tweakability in the blur behind the transparency, via Desktop Effects, namely the...... Blur one, which has some sliders to play with. Sometimes the Contrast effect can change the look of anything relating to text here as well.

Thanks. If I may, enabling another Look and feel theme and coming back to the custom Breeze is also working. But you are right. Logout will be the right way to do it.

A trivial question, I got Splash screen come with breeze theme I copied. And tried to change rectangle > black to rectangle > blue, or another hex value. But whatever colour I input, it still shows the same black colour. Something somewhere is calling the colour black overriding the custom blue.

I completely forgot to mention some tweakability in the blur behind the transparency, via Desktop Effects, namely the... Blur one, which has some sliders to play with. Sometimes the Contrast effect can change the look of anything relating to text here as well.

Thanks. I just tried. Blur is too weak in the default effect. It is almost see through even when we set Noise and Blur at " Strong ". Also, transparency does not affect the K Menu much. But it is nice to have a native option.